BE FREE, OR DIE TRYING

Let us never forget that not one single country in the Soviet bloc ever voted for dictatorship. It was forced on them by Moscow. After the Second World War, Germany was divided. France, the US and UK had their sectors and the Soviets theirs in the east. Berlin, which was in the now new east, was also divided. While attempting to build their socialist utopia, the East German regime quickly realised it had one major problem...its people simply did not want to be a part of it.

In the years after the war, West Germany quickly rebuilt itself. Democracy and capitalism after all, while not perfect, works. Fact.

East Germany, however, with its planned economy and increasing lack of freedom, was in danger of crumbling before it even got going. Worse, for the regime anyway, people could see right through this experiment and left in their droves for the west. In fact, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people fled while they could.

“But this won’t do,” thought the communists. “Oh no, you can’t leave, we can’t have this!”

So, they started to secure the inner German border with barbed wire. This eventually, over the years, led to the full blocking-off of all routes to the west.

The inner German border was seriously beefed up over the years, and by the mid1980s it was near impenetrable.

Like I said a few weeks previously, the Berlin Wall gets much coverage but not the inner German border. Built by a paranoid regime, it ran the length of 1,400 kilometres. There was also a five-kilometre exclusion zone along the length of the division. Thousands of families were forcefully evicted from their homes due to their houses being too close to the walls. This act cut off families and loved ones for decades.

In last week’s column, I wrote about the official border checkpoint at Marienborn. Now, I find myself down south, standing in the middle of nowhere, right up close to the wall that was the inner German border. This is what ran all the way through Germany, slicing it in two until 1990.

And of course, none of this would have happened if it had not been for the Russians who backed it all, encouraged it and supported it. Without them, East Germany would have lasted five minutes.

The inner German border was manned 24/7 by the army, police and of course the ruthless Stasi who had a shoot-to-kill policy. At night time, the entire “death strip” was lit up by floodlights.

Many thousands still attempted to flee, but the vast majority were unsuccessful. At least two hundred innocents were shot and killed while making the attempt, and the Stasi locked up countless others for being enemies of the people.

Like the USSR, and Putin’s Russia today, East Germany was a truly despicable regime.

On the eastern side, just behind people’s family gardens, stood the first wall. If you got over that, there was a section encased in barbed wire where dogs constantly patrolled. If you got past them, you had to scale a barbed wire fence.

But attached to this fence were a series of deadly and brutal guns. The fragmentation

mine gun, or SM70, was attached to this border fence. When the fence wire was touched, the gun fired sharp edged metal fragments indiscriminately.

They were lethal, against international law and after worldwide outcry, even the East German regime was forced to remove them, but not until 1983.

So, you’ve made it over the first wall, dodged the attack dogs, climbed the barbed wire fence without being ripped to pieces or killed by SM70 guns, you now have to run over the huge grass area – or death strip – you see in my photo.

This was at some point mined...but if you managed to avoid being blown up, and not being shot by soldiers in the watchtowers, or by soldiers who patrolled the strip in vehicles and on foot, you then had to avoid 1.5-metredeep ditches (not seen in my photo), and finally, if you were still alive, you had to scale – without being shot at – the giant wall you see in my picture.

To put it bluntly – virtually impossible. In the early ’80s I would have been at Pittodrie one day watching Fergie’s Aberdeen, while at the same time some innocent East German was being shot at exactly where I am currently standing.

I despair when I hear apologists for the Soviet bloc claim that there were many good things about it. Maybe so. However, no political system is worth living under if you can’t speak your mind and are shot at if you choose to leave.

What you see in my photo ran the entire length of Germany up until 1990. Most of it has been pulled down and ploughed over, and nature has returned. But this section, thankfully, has been preserved. It is the

A SNIPER IN A TOWER, AIMING AND FIRING. THIS IS NOT FROM THE SECOND WORLD WAR, THIS WAS HAPPENING IN THE 1980S

NEXT WEEK: POINT ALPHA, WHERE THE WARSAW PACT AND NATO CAME FACE TO FACE

largest preserved section of the former border, fully equipped with wall, death strip and watchtowers.

It was 7am, cold but blue skies with an early morning mist. I was stood, all alone in an area where up until the late ’80s would have seen me shot dead.

I spent around two hours just walking, in silence. I stood right up to the wall and ran my hand over it. I imagined someone who has made it through the aforementioned obstacles and now he faces this. Freedom is on the other side.

I then imagined a Stasi officer, a sniper from a watchtower, aiming and firing. This is not from the Second World War folks, this was happening in the 1980s.

At the start of each border guard shift, the supervising officer reminded the soldiers of their duty to “apprehend or exterminate” anyone who tried to flee.

I sat just beneath the watchtower you see in my picture and looked down and directly towards the wall. I cannot fathom why anyone would choose to be a part of a regime that shoots its own people simply because they want to leave. What goes through the minds of such individuals?

But not all of them believed in the East German regime, for it is known that 2,400 of their very own soldiers and border guards successfully fled to West Germany between 1961 and 1987. Even the people policing it didn’t want to be part of it. That speaks absolute volumes, that does.

You know what, I’m actually sick to the back teeth of people always criticising the west. The US is bad, Britain is bad and so on. Nonsense. We are far from perfect, that is for sure, and there are many aspects of modern life in the UK today that get my goat.

However, I’m not aware of any Brit ever being shot by our own border guards simply because they wanted to leave and go to live in France.

The building of these walls to keep a population locked in was not only a crime against humanity, it was an act that goes against human decency.

THE ZONE: The first wall, on the right, the dogpatrolled area, and then the barbed wire fence.

Clockwise from left: A watchtower with a view over much of the exclusion zone; the death strip and wall at Hotensleben; another look-out post or sniper tower – they were always watching; the deadly and illegal fragmentation mine gun, or SM70.